The Farm at the Edge of the World : A Novel (2016)
Page 31
I love you,
Forever yours,
Will
Epilogue
Now: 30 June 2015
Lucy sits in a dip in the sand dunes, watching the tide roll towards her; lulled by the rhythm of the thud then slither of the waves on the shore.
An early evening in mid-summer: the sand is still warm from the heat of the day; the beach is clear – for the schools haven’t broken up yet, and the dog walkers have all gone home. She lies back, listening to the constant hum of the grasshoppers, the caw of the seagulls. High above, two brown specks hover, throwing a melody that spirals and shimmers: a seamless strand that sears through a mackerel sky and out across the deep blue of the bay.
It is a year since it happened. Since she made the mistake that would see her come hurtling down here. A year ago today, she found out about Matt and Suzi. Tomorrow it will be a year since she last worked as a nurse.
Jacob is doing well. She went back to the hospital in November to say goodbye to her old colleagues, and there was a card from his parents pinned to the noticeboard, thanking them for saving his life. A photograph of a baby boy was attached: still tiny, but unrecognisable from the jumble of bones and tubes she had left, dwarfed by a premature-baby nappy. He had beamed from the photograph, and she had given Emma a short, tight smile of thanks. For how could she not do? Without her checking, little Jacob would not be alive.
She was relieved to leave the cloying warmth of the neonatal ward, and the busy-ness of London. Happy to step off the train at Bodmin and breathe in the damp, lush smell of woodland; salt-lashed hedgerows; gorse-covered moor. Even when the weather was harsh – the puddles frozen to ice, the farm drenched by storms – she has never regretted coming back. There have been setbacks – Uncle Richard changing jobs and having to withdraw some of his investment; Tredinnick cutting their order in the winter – but Skylark ice cream is starting to grow in such a way that she can see their overdraft shrinking. They worked flat-out to fill Kernow’s freezers from Easter, and she and Flo have been selling it at festivals and at the more popular beaches on bank holidays. Their fledgling business is burgeoning at last.
With the threat of financial ruin starting to lift, the farm has begun to feel more cared for. She and Judith ripped the peeling wallpaper from the hall in October and are waging a battle against rogue patches of mould. Her mother seems revitalised: buoyed by Lucy returning home, released from keeping the secret of her husband’s suicide, from having to dissemble. But it is her grandmother who has changed the most.
Watching her getting to know Sam has been like seeing a couple falling in love. At first it was heady: Maggie infatuated, as if she couldn’t get enough of her long-lost son. It might have been hard for Richard, had he been around, but Judith, with two children at home and her granddaughter an increasingly talkative presence, has been mildly amused by such blatant favouritism, while aware that it couldn’t last.
With time, Maggie has become less giddy. She still sees him three or four times a week – for they have years to catch up on – but she views him a little more objectively. ‘I’m not quite sure about the beard,’ she had confided, when he had flirted with a goatee. ‘Do you think he’s a bit alternative, after all?’
Lucy had looked at Sam, with the surf beads he wears now he has retired from delivering the post, and the fortified roll-ups he smokes in his back garden, the sickly-sweet smell of weed overpowering the tamarisk. ‘I’m not sure it matters if he is,’ she had posited, for she is more willing to challenge her grandmother’s prejudices now that Maggie is back to being her opinionated self. ‘No.’ Maggie had thought about it. ‘I don’t suppose for a minute that it does.’
She had got to know Sam better when they took a long train journey up to London, on a chill Tuesday in early December, to attend Alice’s funeral. The church was fuller than she’d expected: her sons, Rob and Ian, and her six grown-up grandchildren, visibly distressed rather than merely subdued. They hadn’t introduced themselves beyond saying they had met her in Cornwall the previous summer, and if anyone noticed a faint resemblance between the dead woman and this nut-brown, wiry-legged man, it wasn’t mentioned. But he later wrote, sparking a tentative email exchange with Rob, the elder son, and a card on his birthday with a black-and-white photograph of a young Will.
Being with Sam – listening to the story of his early years on the moor and of his marriage to Anne and adoption of their two children (Funny: we couldn’t have them; so I did what my parents did. Repaid the favour.) – meant any half-considered plan to meet Matt for a drink was abandoned. And that was for the best. Suzi was replaced by a Cate, and though the news had initially rankled – he had waited how long before moving her in? – Lucy’s sense of inadequacy disappeared far more quickly than she thought. You don’t want to think, later in life: Oh, if only, her grandmother had said; and she doesn’t, she really doesn’t. Regret – wondering what might have been, never having the chance to discover – would have kicked in more clearly if she had returned to her old London life and left the farm.
And what of her? Does she dare risk falling in love again? She is wary, for she knows that love alone is not enough to secure her happiness. Her father’s suicide has shown her that: he could not have been more loved, but he killed himself, still. And yet her grandmother has taught her that if she has a chance she should grasp it with both hands, trusting it will work in a way it couldn’t for a young Maggie. Wondering what might have been. Never having the chance to discover, well, I think that’s the most painful thing.
She has been thinking about this today, on the anniversary of Will’s death. Running along the cliffs, she had stood on the headland: arms outstretched, with a stiff cross-onshore wind blowing, trusting entirely to its strength. Land’s End was to her left, Devon to her right, the Atlantic stretched in front of her: aquamarine then teal, then a deep dark blue as it hit the horizon and the sky rose up and away. The edge of the cliff. The edge of her world. Dare she risk it? Believe in this exhilaration that could buoy her up and buffet away sadness? Below her, the spume swirled around the rocks, drenching a pair of mating seals; above, a pair of guillemots soared on the breeze.
Well, here he is now. A figure making his way through the sand dunes, holding packets of fish and chips, sharp with vinegar, soft and warm as a newborn baby.
‘I thought tea would spill so I’ve brought beer.’ He hands her a bottle. A tear of condensation runs down its neck.
He sits next to her, with the ease that comes from knowing someone for several years; and yet there is a tension in the inches between their thighs, in the small distance between them.
‘To my great-grandfather.’ Ben holds his bottle aloft.
‘To Will,’ Lucy says.
Author’s Note
The idea for The Farm at the Edge of the World emerged from my love a specific area: the cliffs of north Cornwall to the west of Padstow, where I holidayed as a child. When I began to write about a Cornish farm that would be a physical refuge during the war, and an emotional one in the present day, it was inevitable I drew on my knowledge of this place, not least because the north Cornish coast was peppered with WWII airfields, allowing for the possibility of bombing, and I wanted it to be sufficiently close to Bodmin and Bodmin moor.
I have taken a few liberties with the geography, however, and introduced a couple of caves that don’t exist as well as giving it a flavour of the land further to the west – more the Cornwall of West Penrith, the area from which my mother’s farming ancestors originate. The Cornwall that feels as if it is at the edge of the world. I have also introduced dairy cows, though I know that the Camel Estuary is fringed with fields of barley and cauliflowers, and it is sheep that graze on the coast.
If I tweaked the geography and topography, I was deeply conscious of the need not to create historical inaccuracies. At one point, I detailed each of the bombs that fell on Cornwall during World War II and tried to bend my narrative around one. And then I read Kate Atkinson’s Li
fe After Life and her author’s note in which she states that she finds it hard “to create an authentic atmosphere or narrative credibility if continually constrained. Fiction is fiction, after all,” she continues. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t check things afterwards … but sometimes to find the truth at the heart of a book a certain amount of reality falls by the wayside.”
She refers to being unaware of whether any bombs fell in the real Argyll Road in real life and I found that incredibly freeing: as long as I respected history, I could risk a little flexibility.
So a Heinkel did drop bombs in the deer park of Prideaux Place but I am unaware of whether the windows shattered in the main house; and a doodlebug struck the Aldwych on June 30, 1944, but among the many fatalities there was, of course, no Will Cooke.
I hope that this approach is acceptable. As a former news reporter, I have tried to get every detail right where it matters: obsessing about the types of plane that would have flown from Davidstow airfield, and the date on which the Duke of Cornwall’s light infantry would have left for north Africa, (March 23 1943); or the pesticide applied to drenched wheat reed; or the exact amount of milk produced by a cow. I am hugely indebted to the many farmers I have interviewed, some of whom have proofread my copy in a bid to prevent any mistakes creeping in. Should any errors have occurred, they are, of course, all mine.
Acknowledgments
I am hugely indebted to my publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, and in particular to my editors, Kate Parkin and Sara Kinsella, and their assistants Francine Toon and Sharan Matharu, who helped hone this novel into shape. Special thanks, as ever, are due to Lizzy Kremer, my unfailingly supportive agent, and to Harriet Moore, her clever assistant, who urged me to capture the Cornwall I love.
The Farm at the Edge of the World evolved from my love for an area of north Cornwall I have visited since childhood and from my mother’s stories of summers spent running wild on Trewiddle, her grandfather’s farm. I am hugely grateful to my mother, Bobby Hall, and to her cousin, Graham Howard, who whet my appetite with their tales of a world in which children built dens among the stacks at harvest, put chicks in the warming drawer of the Aga, and hid among the rhododendrons. My mother and my father, Chris Hall, fuelled this love affair by taking me on repeated childhood holidays to the area west of Padstow that is detailed in this novel.
Graham’s intricate discussion of the risks of growing wheat reed helped inform my present day story, while my stepfather’s brother, Mark Evans, taught me about running an organic dairy farm. I am particularly grateful to Graham for his patience as I grappled to understand the mid-20th century process of threshing and binding, and to Mark and Will Pratt for allowing me to watch an afternoon milking. If I have come anywhere close to capturing the pressures of present day farming it is thanks to them.
A trio of octogenarian Cornish farmers, all teenage boys in 1943-4, provided invaluable descriptions of how to hand milk a cow or plough a field; and of the sound of a bomb whistling down a chimney or blowing off gateposts. I am hugely grateful to Clifford Butter, Robin Moore and Humphrey Eddy who welcomed me into their homes with grace and humour and allowed me to interview them for hours.
Major Hugo White of Cornwall’s Regimental Museum was a courteous, knowledgeable and efficient guide to the movements of the Duke of Cornwall’s 2nd Battalion, and vividly described being a Winchester schoolboy watching the Battle of Britain dogfights. Steve Perry and Rod Knight, at the Cornwall at War museum, situated at Davidstow airfield, gave me an invaluable sense of place and time.
Thanks are also due to three one-time evacuees I interviewed: Pauline Cocking, who was evacuated with her three siblings in 1939, and whose memories informed much of my early thinking; Norma Thomas, and John Beale. I am also grateful to Sarah McDonnell, Ian Johnson of the NFU in Exeter, and Alison Spence of the Cornwall Record Office, for providing links to contacts including these.
For my medical aspects of the present-day story, I am indebted to Gillian Bowker and Harriet Sperling, and to Jean Slocomb of Cancer Research UK.
Writing my second novel has been a steep learning curve and I am proud to be part of the Prime Writers, a group of authors who have all been traditionally published over the age of 40, and who have provided consistent support.
I am also grateful for the continued support of my extended family, not least in helping with childcare. Special thanks go to my mother, to my in-laws, Sue and Bryn Vaughan and to my lovely sister, Laura Tennant.
But my most heartfelt thanks, as ever, go to my husband, Phil, and to my children, Ella and Jack. Not only have they had to put up with my going to Cornwall without them but they have grown to love it almost as much as me.
Table of Contents
Contents
Also by Sarah Vaughan
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments